Envy
by CoryphaeusRex
Summary: She doesn't want to hate him, she never wanted to hate him but nobody had ever made it easy. Unrequited Bella/Remus. Rated for infrequent bad language. Written for a trade with thedragonchaser.


**Author's Notes and Disclaimer:** Blah blah, don't own Harry Potter, etc. This is a response to a challenge by my wonderful friend thedragonchaser, who wanted a Bella/Remus fic explaining why Bella hates Tonks so much. I am nothing if not obliging. Rated for a few bad words, but nothing overly serious. Read and review.

(o.o)

Envy is poisonous. It curls into your heart and strangles all the love from it until all you've got left is that one burning coal-black ember that is the flip-side of love. It chokes you on your own breath until you're spitting curses and what's emerging is a black spiral of poisonous petrol smoke in which the words are lost and burned to cinders.

But when all that is gone and you have reached the other side of pain, that calm, idyllic pool where you're floating above it, then you straighten from the inky depths and you find, where your heart used to be, a vortex of hate. It can power you. You can move through the day to day humdrum of existence with no reliance on all those petty social niceties that the clockwork people require to wind up their keys.

You can spend weeks alone in your own head, and that vortex will keep you going, keep you fed and warm.

Having a picture of him on the wall would be cliché. Bellatrix doesn't. If she did she'd stick her thumbnails deep into the printed eyes, twist them round, curls of paper forming underneath her fingers. She'd watch his mouth open in a howl, and she'd cackle and screech like a wild thing. She'd pull her nails out, look with satisfaction one moment and then her brittle, porcelain-doll face would crack and she'd be a lost little girl who's broken something _really_ valuable and is waiting for an adult to come in and shout.

She would have plaster dust and wallpaper under her fingers most days. She would be able to peel the remains of the photograph from beneath her nails and she would see his beautiful eyes, wide in horror, on flakes of paper.

She doesn't want to hate him, she never wanted to hate him but nobody had ever made it easy. Trying not to show any sign of weakness in front of her viper sisters, trying to get back on Sirius' good side but never quite managing to say the right thing at the right time. And then the heart-stopping feeling that maybe her clever cousin had worked out just why she was so keen to try and accost him when he was with their little gang.

And then the hiding.

And then the brooding.

Pure-blood families never produce much in the way of sanity. Not after a few hundred generations. And in her dark house with her treacherous sisters, so eager to turn on her and denounce her like shrieking harpies, is it any wonder she's a trifle unbalanced? Constantly having to guard her private thoughts, creating a small shrine in her heart, because there was nowhere she could create a real one in that prying house, that cloying environment of spies and turncoats.

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and Bellatrix tends to get them confused nowadays. If she were to see him, her heart would skip a beat, but she wouldn't be sure whether to tear his hair out or kiss him until he couldn't breathe. Either way, there would be harm done.

Now, on a completely different coin, of a different metal, in a different purse entirely, is the feeling Bellatrix holds in her heart for the little _bitch_. The harlot, with her simpering faces and her oh-so-funny metamorphoses. This is loathing, and it is so far removed from the love-hate that Bellatrix feels for him, the two are like oil and water, and can never be held in her head at the same time.

If she had the whore's picture, it would burn. And then she would repair it. And then it would burn again, and she would watch that transforming face contort and scream as the flames consumed it and blistered the skin of the photograph. She would do it over and over again and she would have the picture copied, made bigger, so she could watch every muscle underneath the skin moving, as the paper shrivelled and curled.

She would dance around it.

She would sing.

And she would entertain the idea that one day, if she got rid of the slut, that she might sing and dance with him, and they could run away somewhere. Far from her venomous sisters, far from her overly obstructive cousin.

The horrible moment would come when, on the edge of that swelling chord, with rainbows and cottages and green fields, the crushing realisation would come that this would never be so. She would scream and spit and curse the bitch into the ground. She would curse his blood, then change her mind and rescind her curses, call them back on herself in a cloud of self-loathing and burning hatred.

She has no pictures.

She sits in the corner of her room, her nice new _room_ with no bars and no guards, and even in the comfort and the decadence the envy gnaws at her soul until she's biting her nails and clawing at her own face, spoiling it so that when she walks the hallways, moaning like a mad ghost, men will turn away from her. Her husband will refuse her, and she will be free to climb to the highest room of the tallest tower and imagine that she is the beauty in the tower, waiting to be rescued by the beast.


End file.
